More Than a Girl With a Gimmick

Gypsy Rose Lee's inimitable burlesque act won her fame, but her classic memoir is what made her immortal

By

CARL ROLLYSON

Updated Jan. 7, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

There is perhaps no better introduction to Gypsy Rose Lee than the epigraph to "American Rose," Karen Abbott's new bio graphy: "May your bare ass always be shining." These good wishes, sent to the First Lady of the Striptease by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1959, suggest the magnitude of Lee's celebrity at that time. Through her stage perform ances, books and the musical "Gypsy" (based on her life story), she became not only a legendary show- business figure but part of the American mythos.

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Gypsy Rose Lee in her heyday.
Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

A New Yorker cartoon reprinted in Lee's autobiography epitomizes her appeal: A pot-bellied, bald man shaving at the bathroom sink glances at his wife, who is speaking to him from behind a shower curtain. She wears an amused expression, her hands gripping the curtain as a covering for her breasts while she sticks one leg out, showing her calf and just a bit of thigh. The caption reads: "Hey, Sam—Gypsy Rose Lee!" Not only did women admire her humor and suggestive style, the nation as a whole celebrated a woman who could make sex into playful entertainment.

From the moment she first began performing in burlesque in the early 1930s, Lee was unusually inventive, pinning to her flesh-colored body suits articles of clothing that she could whisk off and throw into the orchestra pit or the audience. She specialized in breakaway dresses with removable panels. She paraded across the stage in prefabricated dresses, bridal gowns, black-net skirts and lacy negligees. What she wore and how she discarded it created the fascination.

American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare, The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee By Karen Abbott Random House, 422 pages, $26

It soon became clear that Lee was a world-class entertainer who just happened to be working in burlesque. In Broadway revues, and later one-woman shows, she tugged at garters and showed a line of leg bent at the knee, or crossed her silk-stockinged limbs and cocked her head in statuesque poses. She decked herself out in late Victorian garb and did a "bustle dance," mocking the propriety of an earlier age even as she maintained her own brand of decorum. Lee's intelligence was equally recognizable in her unusually witty banter with the audience (and authorities). "I wasn't naked," she once protested after a police raid. "I was completely covered by a blue spotlight." How many other striptease artists could hold down their own radio program, as she briefly did?

By the mid-1950s, Gypsy Rose Lee was famous across the country as a performer. But she made herself immortal by writing a book: her sensational 1957 autobiography, "Gypsy." She was so good at embellishing her own story— inventing a narrative that had only fitful commerce with the truth—that biographers have been kept busy fact-checking her ever since.

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Gypsy Rose Lee at work on her typewriter in 1958.
Everett Collection

A revived interest in burlesque culture over the past few years has led to a series of new evaluations. In 2009, Noralee Frankel did her homework in the archives and produced "Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee," which restored some of the truth about her story—inevitably without the panache that made Lee's own life such a wonderful performance. Even better was Rachel Shteir's "Gypsy: The Art of the Tease" (also 2009), an elegant and insightful study of Lee's self-fashioning that Ms. Abbott relies on heavily.

So what does "American Rose" offer that is new? First, invaluable interviews with June Havoc, Gypsy's sister, a tormented observer who could never be sure when Lee was on the level. The author's story of how she got to know Havoc, and her account of the wary transactions between the bio grapher and her interviewee, provide real insight into how icons construct their lives and how biographers go about deconstructing them.

But Ms. Abbott has greater ambitions than just enlivening her biography with material from those who knew Lee. Like Lee herself, Ms. Abbott wants to show off her own intelligence and style. That's perhaps a good thing in a biographer dealing with a flamboyant subject. Even so, she tries too hard at times to evoke Lee's inner states. Ms. Abbott's sentences can read as if they came out of a novel, not a biography: "Not a day passes without her retelling, if just to her own ears, the densely woven and tightly knotted story of her own legend, and not a day passes when she doesn't wonder how its final line will read." It is always tempting for bio graphers to employ words that obscure the sad truth that they cannot know about every day of their subjects' lives.

Ms. Abbott also denies herself one of the great stodgy pleasures of biography: laying out the chronology of a subject's life in what impatient reviewers might call the plodding approach. Instead, she interrupts the sequence of Lee's life with key scenes from later years and from other lives connected with Lee's. Thus a chapter set in 1912 is followed by one in 1940. Readers of novels would not find this flash forward disconcerting, but in a biography—at least in this one—a shifting structure under mines the steady accumulation of detail that makes an account convincing.

After five chapters of Ms. Abbott, I started consulting Ms. Shteir's "Gypsy: The Art of the Tease." Its table of contents—with chapters on "Undressing the Family Romance," "The Queen of Striptease," "To Hollywood and Back," "The Rise and Fall of the Striptease Intellectual"— indicate the kind of analysis short biographies often provide so well. For those unfamiliar with the Lee biblio graphy, which comprises not merely her own memoirs but those of her sister and other family members, Ms. Shteir's is the book to pick up first.

Or perhaps second. Despite its flaws and fabrications, Lee's own autobiography is still the best guide to understanding the nature of her success. The story of her first strip act—no matter how many of its details are invented—is true to the woman that Rose Louise Hovick became when she changed her name to Gypsy Rose Lee at the Gayety Theater in Toledo, Ohio, in 1931. Her biographers, for all their skepticism, cannot resist relying on Lee's memoir. She always wanted to be taken seriously as a writer—she wrote two novels and once shared a house with W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers and Paul Bowles—and her autobiography is certainly a classic of the form.

Chapter 26 of "Gypsy: A Memoir" describes her family of starving, bedraggled vaudeville performers arriving at the Gayety Theater only to hear the show's producer telling the stage manager that the lead stripper has been jailed and no one is available to do her scenes. "My daughter does scenes," says Gypsy's mother, who is portrayed in the auto biography as the epitome of the pushy stage parent. Lee writes: "I wanted to hide somewhere. Mother pushed me toward the two men and I wanted the floor to open up and let me drop quietly through it."

Up to this point in the autobiography, Rose Louise, fat and untalented, has been overshadowed by her younger sister, June, who as a 3-year-old was already performing as a dancer. The producer asks about Rose Louise: "Does she strip?" As Lee reports: "Mother looked him straight in the eye and said yes." Afterward she assured her daughter that she would have to do no more than drop a shoulder strap at the end of her routine. And, at first, Lee suggests, she didn't.

Lee continues: "The full importance of what had happened suddenly hit me." She would soon be a star, playing to ever more enthusiastic crowds, and she decided to behave accordingly, changing her name, seeing to it that the marquee reflected the change, embellish ing her act by breaking from the chorus line and inventing her own moves. It is all, of course, worthy of the movies.

Over the years, Lee's bio graphers have diligently undermined parts of this tale. Ms. Abbott notes that June Havoc once did an interview in which she scoffed at her sister's version of her first strip: "She was never an ingenue. . . . And she never just dropped a shoulder strap. Ever." Equally valuable is Ms. Abbott's interview with Gypsy's son, Eric, who told the biographer: "I'm sure it was not an easy year [1931]. . . . There were rough girls, gangsters, prostitution. They had to eat. And she was perhaps forced to do things against her will." The scholarly Ms. Frankel, in "Stripping Gypsy," observes wryly in an endnote: "There is no record in Gypsy Rose Lee's scrapbook that her first strip was done in Toledo."

Ms. Shteir, steeped in the history of striptease, provides a shrewd analysis of Gypsy's reminiscence, noting that it "conflates several stories from showbiz mythology": the show must go on, a star is born and my mother made me do it. The signal point, Ms. Shteir notes, is that Lee could not present herself as stripping of her own accord. That would be "too naughty" and "vulgar." Yet, Ms. Shteir observes, Gypsy did not protest her mother's brash maneuvering.

Ms. Abbott adds an important piece to this puzzle, uncovering a New York Daily News article (from Sept. 15, 1936) that quotes Gypsy Rose Lee just five years after the events in question and 20 years before she committed the myth to writing. "The shoulder strap led to one thing and another, if you know what I mean," Lee says matter-of-factly, "and that's how I started in the strip business."

Here Ms. Abbott is able to pin her subject down and suggest why the autobiography had to replace the facts: "It was beneath her to attach details to that 'one thing and another,' disrespectful to include such memories in her scrapbooks, sacrilege to admit that the singular, legendary Gypsy Rose Lee had begun just like everyone else."

—Mr. Rollyson is the author of seven biographies and of "Biography: A User's Guide" (2008).

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